Announced: $3k Mac Pro, retina iPad Mini, iPad Air, and OS X free-of-charge

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I am always super excited by these announcement events… But then I realize that really? I can’t justify the expense. Which makes me sad, because I really, really want to be able to justify it. :slight_smile:

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Well then. Nice gear.

The biggest thing I am getting out of this is that there will apparently be no more operating systems named after big cats. Oh well.

“Maverick” isn’t a word I would typically associate with safety and stability.

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To be fair, neither is “lion”.

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The naming convention for MacOS X has changed from “cats” to “Unique locations in California dear to the hearts of Apple employees in Cupertino.” Mavericks is a famous surfing location, named after dog…

So… from Cats to Dogs.

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I can’t either, but I’m still kind of excited because I need a Mac Pro and this might help drive down the cost of older models.

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[quote=“beschizza, post:1, topic:12632”]

OS X Mavericks is available free of charge[/quote]

I will take interest in OSX Mavericks when it comes free as in freedom, though I suspect that makes me an unliklely Apple customer.

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From the iPad announcement: “you’ll have your choice of silver, white, grey and black color options”.

As if any of those are colors.

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And interestingly, at least on the Canadian store, only grey and silver are being shown currently.

Given that the original iMac was “Bondi Blue”, after Bondi Beach in Australia, very apropos.

Actually, it’s “silver and white” and “grey and black.” And some people will be annoyed that there is no “champagne (gold)” color option.

Apple participates a lot in Open Source. You probably knew that, though.

Unrelated: iLife and iWork are moving to “free as in cost”/“freemium” models, as well.

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The new MacBook Pro actually has me considering an Apple product. They seem to be the only lightweight + long battery-life laptops that still provide a 16:10 aspect ratio. I’ve tried 16:9 displays, and it’s just not enough vertical space (from a code editing perspective).

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Get a Chromebook Pixel! Forget 16:9, 3:2 is where it’s at!

Really nice specs on the Mac. For quite a long time I’ve roasted Apple for the premium they charge on their unremarkable hardware. Looks like I’ll have to relent at least a little bit.

Same for the other big cats. :wink:

I still think “free as in cost” is too high a price to pay. I’ll pay good money for the privilege of using software that’s free as in freedom, but luck has it I don’t have to.

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It’s not Maverick, it’s “Mavericks” as in the California surfing location. They’ve switched to California locations. I think it was Ars Technica that suggested the name might have been picked as an in-joke on the release “conservative” stance, at at time when its iOS sibling is making a big transition – like when they named Cheetah (fastest big cat) the slowest OSX release of the bunch.

How exactly? I only know of WebKit (when they sort of ripped off KHTML, and then re-released the code mostly because they were bound by the license) and the Darwin kernel (which is a bit pointless, without the graphic libs). I’m sure there are more projects they’re involved in, I just don’t know them; do you know any?

As an old Linux user who moved to OSX a couple of years ago, I can thank them for their choice of kernel making it easier for the FOSS community to work with good hardware running a POSIX system, but I don’t see them as big movers in that space.